Drunk on Love(49)

They both stopped, and then laughed.

“You first,” Margot said.

Luke smiled at her, and then his smile faded.

“I was just going to say—I’m sorry if I said yes to Elliot too quickly. I’d understand if you didn’t want me to drive you home. I haven’t—really—apologized for what happened in your office, and I need to.”

She shook her head.

“You have nothing to apologize for. I could have stopped you at any point. I didn’t.”

He turned and looked at her.

“Yeah, you could have. But still.”

She waved that away.

“I appreciate it, but it was my fault, too,” she said.

She tugged the ponytail holder out of her hair and let it down. It probably looked terrible, but the breeze from the open windows felt so good.

“Anyway,” she said. “You didn’t say yes to my brother too quickly. I think we both needed a break from one another. I was going to say that I hope it’s okay to impose on you in this way, and on your day off.” She untangled her hair with her fingers. “Oh God, I just remembered—you were with your family, you probably had plans for later!”

He shook his head.

“No, my mom had to get back to the inn, don’t worry about that.”

She relaxed against the seat and closed her eyes. It felt good to sit here, and have someone else be in charge, after a day of working and socializing and being on and dealing with Elliot. She was exhausted.

“Well, thanks again,” she said. “A few more minutes of that and Elliot and I might have murdered each other. No, I should be accurate—Elliot is far too levelheaded to do something like murder. I would have been the one murdering him—that’s on me.”

She must be really tired. Luke worked for them, for God’s sake. Why did she constantly forget that when she was around him?

“I shouldn’t have said that, I’m sorry. That was wildly unprofessional of me. Again. Forget you heard that.”

“First of all, I’ve always thought you and Elliot got along great, and I would never peg you as the killer if Elliot turned up dead,” he said.

She couldn’t help but laugh at that.

“And second, I can definitely forget I heard that. But also: if we keep tripping over things, and apologizing to each other, and cutting ourselves off, that’s going to make this drive really annoying. Feel free to tell me no, this is crossing a line or whatever, but for the purposes of this car ride, can we make a rule that we’re just Luke and Margot? That your job and my job don’t matter, and I’m just your neighbor giving you a ride home? And everything we say to one another doesn’t leave this car? Or we could not do that, and just sit in silence for however long it takes to get home”—they pulled onto the freeway and saw the traffic stretched out in front of them—“but I think that’s going to take a while.”

Margot thought about that. While she could usually chatter on for way too long with bright, impersonal conversation about the winery, somehow they already knew each other too well for her to talk to him like that. And it had been a long day; she was clearly so exhausted and stressed about Elliot and the party and everything else that she’d already threatened to murder her brother in front of one of their employees. Who knew what else she’d say?

“Okay,” she said. “Just Margot and Luke. Cone of silence. Thank you.”

She looked over at him. He was concentrating on merging into a lane, but he smiled. She liked his smile way too much. But right now they were just Margot and Luke.

“Honestly, you’re doing me a favor,” he said. “I spent hours with my mom listening to her talk about vintage kitchen goods or whatever; I need some interesting conversation so I don’t go home and start looking up the difference between old Pyrex and new Pyrex, and if you know, please don’t tell me; I know it will just lead to more questions, and I’m trying to pull myself out of this rabbit hole.”

She laughed, like she knew he wanted her to. She could tell he was trying to put her at ease. She appreciated it. Being in the car with him, being this close to him, made all of her nerve endings feel exposed.

“Okay.” He glanced over at her. “I’ll go first. Here’s something that I absolutely would only tell my neighbor Margot, not my hypothetical boss Margot—I up and quit my last job in a rage. Just got furious one day and quit.”

She raised her eyebrows at him.

“Was it because of what you told me on the way back from the staff dinner? The racist thing that your old boss said?”

He shook his head slowly.

“No. Not for that. I’d probably have more respect for myself if that was why.” He sighed. “It was something small, stupid. I brought something up in a meeting, an idea I had, and he mocked it. Just totally laughed at me, and got other people laughing at me, too. Which had happened more than once, actually—to me, to other people, he did that kind of thing, to kind of get us competing with each other—but I was just suddenly so fucking sick of it. I drafted my resignation email while I was still in that meeting, and about an hour later, I pressed send.”

He wasn’t looking at her. His hands gripped the steering wheel tightly. It had been hard, she realized, for him to tell her this.

“Good for you,” she said.